In the 1970s, Santa Fe was a counterculture mecca. Forty years after that boom, the city has an extremely high quality of life and an ageing population.
Photograph: Found Image Press/Found Image Press/Corbis

On a Thursday night in late January, George RR Martin arrived at Santa Fe’s Duel Brewery in a hybrid car sporting a “Guns Don’t Kill People, George RR Martin Kills People” bumper sticker. Within half an hour, the bar had reached capacity. Inside, Martin, wearing black pants, a black shirt and red suspenders, chatted with members of Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf.

The young artists and the Game of Thrones creator had a lot to discuss. That morning, Meow Wolf had announced that Martin was contributing $2.7m to back the collective’s ambitious new project: turning a dusty, abandoned 20,000 square foot bowling alley into The House of Eternal Return. Visitors will enter through a seemingly normal-looking Victorian house and inside, they’ll find passageways and portals that will lead them to multiple parallel universes. The multi-million dollar project will, if all goes according to plan, employ 75 artists and draw 100,000 visitors per year.

Though the 66-year-old fantasy novelist and the group of young radical artists may have seemed like an odd match, their collaboration makes a strange sort of sense: Meow Wolf and Martin share an exploratory sensibility; the project appeals to Martin’s playful spirit and his interest in creating new worlds. The House of Eternal Return, Martin told me, would be exciting and strange – “something the city has never seen before”.

In the 1970s, Santa Fe was a counterculture mecca, drawing in hippies charmed by the region’s confluence of cultures and proximity to nature. Forty years after that boom, Santa Fe has an extremely high quality of life, stellar environmental policies, strong cultural institutions and a history of progressive leadership. Advocates have successfully preserved much of what made the city compelling; downtown Santa Fe is still a place of narrow roads and adobe walls, where light pollution is so minimal that it’s still possible to pick out constellations.

But a serious problem plagues the city: Santa Fe’s population is increasingly, and worryingly, old. Between 2000 and 2010, Santa Fe lost population in every age cohort under 45, and the city’s median age rose more than three years, to 43.6 – six years above the national average, and nearly a decade older than cities popular with millennials like Denver. The youth exodus is variously blamed on the city’s high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, uninspiring nightlife and limited employment options.

Local affordable housing activist Daniel Werwath moved here 11 years ago when he was in his mid-20s. “I remember feeling like, what the hell is wrong with this place?,” he told me. “Where are the young people? Where’s the music?”

The House of Eternal Return: a high-concept explorable art installation. Photograph: Meow Wolf

Werwath and his friends felt stymied by the city’s “rules-y” atmosphere, which didn’t leave much space for experimentation or small-scale entrepreneurship. One particularly devastating summer, 16 of Werwath’s friends decamped for greener pastures – Austin, Brooklyn, Denver, Portland – where many of them promptly started small businesses or opened restaurants.

Santa Fe, a city that’s older than the United States, was in danger of being imprisoned by its past. “For years,” the Santa Fe New Mexican editorialized recently, “we have heard mutterings – deserved – of Santa Fe’s inability to develop its economy outside of tourism and government. We have heard gnashing of teeth over the inability of this culturally blessed town to hold on to its young people. The future, at times, has appeared bleak indeed.”

George RR Martin moved to Santa Fe in 1979, drawn to the city’s beauty, climate, and food culture. But by 2013, when the hit HBO series based on his Game of Thrones novels was entering its third season, Martin was starting to notice the loss of youthful spirit in Santa Fe. It bothered him that the town felt as though it shut down at 9pm, and he decided to do his part in bringing life back to certain corners of the city.

Against the better advice of some of his friends, Martin purchased the Jean Cocteau Cinema, a 123-seat, one-screen Art Deco movie theater, which had been closed for seven years.

Shortly after the deal went through, Martin came by the theater one night to survey his purchase. The light flooding through the glass bricks was like something long dormant “coming alive again”, he said. In the re-opened Cocteau, paintings by local artists line the walls; along with popcorn and soda, the snack counter sells Game of Thrones miniatures, signed copies of Martin’s books and shiny coins identified as “silver stags of Torrhen Stark, Lord of Winterfell”. Last year, the Cocteau hosted marathon screenings of the HBO series; Martin attended, accompanied by a live wolf.

The Cocteau’s reopening established Martin’s role as “Santa Fe’s unofficial minister of culture”. When Martin went on to purchase a former charter school and develop it into affordable artist studios, he further endeared himself to the community. During the five days I spent in Santa Fe, I heard three separate people refer to Martin as “a saint”. Mayor Javier Gonzales called him “Santa Fe’s angel”.

Not long after the Cocteau’s grand re-opening, however, Martin became concerned that the cinema wasn’t attracting a youthful audience. He enlisted a consultant with strong connections to Santa Fe’s young arts scene, Meow Wolf’s Vince Kadlubek, to amplify the Cocteau’s social media presence.

And then one day last fall, Kadlubek approached Martin with an unexpected proposition: did he want to buy a bowling alley?

***

Kadlubek, 32, is a rare combination of politician, punk and start-up founder; he also seems to be one of those people gifted with the ability to make improbable things happen. “He’s absolutely willing to take on that politician role,” says Santa Fe artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. “He’s so good at being on the ball, lobbying, saying the right things to the right people. He’s really given a face and a voice to this movement of younger artists in Santa Fe.”

Kadlubek grew up in Santa Fe, both inspired by the city’s creative promise and disappointed by its failure to deliver to young people. In 2005, he decamped to Portland, Oregon. “I would find myself at Stumptown looking around and thinking, ‘This is great, but it is already great. There’s nothing to work towards here,’” he told me. “Portland felt set, it felt like it was already doing so many things right.” Within a year, he was back in Santa Fe.

Kadlubek co-founded Meow Wolf in 2008 with a group of like-minded workaholic artist friends. Back then, the group was as interested in throwing epic dance parties as creating immersive art installations, and their projects were strictly permit-free, underground endeavors. Over time, their installations – which members sometimes compare to video games made real – became increasingly complex. They created a fake supermarket in a Santa Fe strip mall, and a glittery explorable robot city at New Mexico State University. Though Meow Wolf’s core group of artists are mostly in their 20s and 30s, their meetings began drawing people as young as 16 and as old as 60.

The collective’s experiments were compelling enough that the city’s official channels started paying attention. In 2011 Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Art commissioned Meow Wolf’s largest project to-date, a 70ft interactive ship called the Due Return, which drew 25,000 visitors over three months. The Due Return’s success led to Meow Wolf being invited to create installations in Miami, New York and Chicago. During their travels, the group began to seriously discuss the possibility of making a permanent home for their work in Santa Fe.

At the same time, true to its experimental origins, Meow Wolf was pondering new ways to fund such an endeavor. The Due Return was a $50,000 project – in part, costs were so low because all the artists worked on a volunteer basis, often putting in 16-hour days for no pay. Clearly, this was not a sustainable model. While there was plenty of art money floating around Santa Fe, operating as a non-profit and raising funds through grants was an achingly slow and often conservative process. Similarly, it was clear that the traditional gallery model wasn’t going to work for the group’s collaborative, ephemeral work, either.

Instead, the collective decided to mobilize as a for-profit venture. In 2014, Kadlubek and Meow Wolf co-founder Sean Di Ianni participated in a local start-up accelerator, which awarded them a $25,000 prize. The group began spending meetings discussing what kind of value-added they provided, and what equity in an arts collective might look like. “There was a lot of new language – customer acquisition, lifetime value, all of these terms that felt like the stuff your crazy capitalist uncle would say,” Di Ianni says. “That was a little weird to adjust to, but we realized that we’d been inadvertently developing a product we felt really strongly about over the past seven years, so it didn’t feel that awkward to begin thinking about it as something that an audience would pay for.”

Javier Gonzales, mayor of Santa Fe. Photograph: Javier Gonzales

Another key part of the puzzle fell into place in 2013, when Kadlubek found a kindred spirit in Javier Gonzales, a fourth generation Santa Fean in his mid-40s, who was on his way to becoming the city’s first openly gay mayor. Young, handsome, and charismatic, Gonzales took the young artists’ concerns to heart; his campaign slogan was “Growing Santa Fe Young.” Kadlubek hosted an early campaign event for Gonzales at a now-defunct space called Idiot House; he and a few others went on to work for Gonzales’s campaign. “[The mayor] is the sort of person everyone has a crush on, like Obama,” says Shannon Murphy, founder and executive director of the After Hours Alliance, a non-profit that promotes nightlife in Santa Fe. “Young artists were volunteering to make posters for him – he just has that charisma.”

In March of last year, Gonzales won an easy victory, thanks in part to newly mobilized young voters – turnout among 18-24 year-olds was 500% higher than in the 2010 election. As mayor, Gonzales has been an enthusiastic supporter of Meow Wolf’s work. “Santa Fe has more than 400 years of cultural richness,” Gonzales told me. “It’s important that we nurture our authentic creativity. Vince [Kadlubek] is a product of our Santa Fe public schools. Meow Wolf created their own mold, here. [The House of Eternal Return] is a way to expand our current definition of art, and to increase opportunities to access that creative spirit.”

By mid-2014, the momentum was there. Meow Wolf had serious professional ambitions and the support of the city – now they just needed a building, and a whole bunch of money.

***

When Meow Wolf members first set foot in the defunct bowling alley that will become the House of Eternal Return, the place was full of dust and debris, including the desiccated corpse of a bird – a bad omen if there ever was one. But there were good omens, too: the square footage was ample enough to inspire serious flights of fancy, and the carpet’s neon confetti pattern had a certain Meow Wolf-ian exuberance.

The group put together a proposal, including a rough budget and architectural mock-ups, and presented it to Martin, who was intrigued but cautious. It wasn’t until he saw the building in person that he really began to fall for the idea. “The space pretty astonishing,” he said. “I could see all sorts of possibilities.” After extensive discussions, Martin agreed to be a major financial backer of the project, with one serious caveat: the giant bowling pin in the parking lot had to stay.

With Martin’s support, the collective began planning an installation 10 times bigger than the Due Return. There will be a Mad Max-style shantytown, rope bridges, hidden doors and plenty of opportunities to crawl, hide, or otherwise explore. Judging from Meow Wolf’s plans, the finished project will be similar to St Louis’s City Museum, but with more colors, and an underlying Lovecraftian mythology. The building will also feature low-cost artist studios, an arts learning center run by a local non-profit, and a gift shop selling local artists’ work. There are visions of food trucks in the parking lot and bands playing at night.

The Due Return, one of Meow Wolf’s art installations. Photograph: Meow Wolf

Martin’s $2.7m contribution will go toward purchasing and renovating the building; Meow Wolf will pay him monthly rent. Constructing the House of Eternal Return will cost another $1m. Meow Wolf has already snagged some high-profile investors, including Etsy co-founder Jared Tarbell and his wife, Laurie, but the pressure is on; operating as a for-profit means more freedom, but also higher stakes. Several collective members have quit their jobs and are working full-time for Meow Wolf. To keep pace with the revenue scheme built into the business plan, the House of Eternal Return will need to open this fall. “It’s a bold move,” says the AHA’s Murphy. “But they’re willing to take risks that no one else is, and they have the track record to back it up.”

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In late January, I drove four miles south of Santa Fe’s traditional tourist epicenter to Siler Road, the industrial corridor that’s home to most of Santa Fe’s body shops and upholstery repair operations, as well as its underground arts scene. It’s one of the few areas of town not under the purview of Santa Fe’s architectural review board, which means it’s exempt from the adobe hegemony of much of the rest of Santa Fe. (Considering Santa Fe’s growing Latino population, the majority of whom live on the city’s southern fringes, you could argue that Siler Road will soon feel more like the center of town, rather than its edge.)

Among the scrap yards and cement factories, there are signs of a different kind of development: Duel, a Belgian-style brewery opened in 2013; Creative Santa Fe is planning a $14m affordable live-work housing development for the neighborhood. And soon this will be the home of theHouse of Eternal Return.

The project’s official unveiling drew a crowd.Inside the bowling alley, Meow Wolf’s friends and supporters milled around, eating gluten-free pastries, and trying to imagine the space’s future incarnation as a portal to another universe. Mayor Gonzales wore a crisp suit and a striped tie; Martin sported his trademark fisherman’s cap. There was a general spirit of exuberance and mutual celebration –Kadlubek offered “the most epic thanks” to Martin, “one of the coolest people I’ve ever met,” and Mayor Gonzales held up Meow Wolf alongside Georgia O’Keeffe as an example of authentic Santa Fe art. In between the talk of explorable portals, Kadlubek also spoke about the Meow Wolf brand, their financial planner and their business model.

Later, over lunch at a New Mexican cafe across the street, Kadlubek pulled out his laptop to check the group’s Kickstarter campaign – they’re hoping to raise $100,000 by 2 March while a half-dozen other Meow Wolf members reminisced about the weeks they spent building the Due Return, working day and night in the high-stakes communal frenzy that seems to be the collective’s preferred mode of creation.

“I think of the Due Return as our hit album, and we’ve been on tour ever since,” said Dave McPherson.

“Yeah, and this will be our White Album,” said Benji Geary. “Now we can really get weird.”